Disarmament A Basic Guide by Melissa Gillis Third Edition United Nations, New York, 2012 Note THE UNITED NATIONS OFFICE FOR DISARMAMENT AFFAIRS has published the Ba- sic Guide pursuant to the purposes of the United Nations Disarmament Informa- tion Programme. The mandate of the Programme is to inform, educate and gener- ate public understanding of the importance of multilateral action, and support for it, in the field of arms limitation and disarmament. For more information, contact: Information and Outreach Branch United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs United Nations New York, NY 10017 Telephone: 212.963.3022 Email: [email protected] Website: www.un.org/disarmament THE FIRST EDITION of the Guide was originally written by Bhaskar Menon and pub- lished in 2001 in collaboration with the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Committee on Disarmament, Peace and Security. The second edition was authored and edited by Melissa Gillis, the editor of Disarmament Times, and was published in 2009. Ms. Gillis edited this third edition and provided updated text where ap- propriate. The Guide is intended for the general reader, but may also be useful for the disarmament educator or trainer. COVER DESIGN based on the United Nations poster entitled “The United Nations for a Better World”, designed by Ricardo Ernesto Jaime de Freitas. THE VIEWS expressed are those of the author/editor and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations. MATERIAL appearing in the Guide may be reprinted without permission, provided that credit is given to the author/editor and to the United Nations. Since 1972, the NGO COMMITTEE ON DISARMAMENT, PEACE AND SECURITY has provided services to citizens’ groups concerned with the peace and disarmament activities of the United Nations. Its efforts include organizing conferences, serving as a clearinghouse for information, publishing a newspaper (Disarmament Times) and acting as a liaison between the disarmament community and the United Na- tions. Learn more at http://disarm.igc.org. SYMBOLS OF UNITED NATIONS DOCUMENTS are composed of capital letters combined with figures. These documents are available in the official languages of the United Nations at http://ods.un.org. Specific disarmament-related documents can also be accessed through the disarmament reference collection at http://disarmament.un.org/library.nsf. THE GUIDE can be found online at http://www.un.org/disarmament/HomePage/ ODAPublications/AdhocPublications. Contents Foreword . iv 1. Why is Disarmament Important? . 1 2. Global Military Expenditures . 9 3. Nuclear Weapons . 17 4. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. 31 5. Chemical Weapons . 39 6. Biological Weapons . 43 7. Missiles and Missile Defence . 49 8. Conventional Arms and the Arms Trade . 57 9. Small Arms and Light Weapons . 67 10. Landmines . 75 11. Cluster Munitions . 81 12. Children and Armed Conflict . 85 13. Women, Peace and Security . 91 14. The United Nations and the Work of Disarmament . 99 15. Stay Informed and Get Involved . 107 Appendix. Arms Control and Disarmament Treaties and Related Instruments . 115 iii Foreword AS A UNITED NATIONS MESSENGER OF PEACE, I believe disarma- ment is a great cause serving all mankind. It is my passion. Twice in the twentieth century, the massive build-up of offensive weapons have led to two world wars, with the latter ending in the world witnessing the most destructive weapon ever conceived by man, the atomic bomb. The development of the atomic bomb led to a nuclear arms race which culminated in the United States and the Soviet Union pos- sessing a total of some 70,000 nuclear weapons between them during the height of the Cold War, a staggering number that had the potential to annihilate all life from our fragile planet. Atomic bombs were the not the only weapons of mass destruc- tion. Man has invented, and the world has witnessed, the use of chemical and biological weapons. Chemical weapons were a mainstay of the First World War when chlorine and mustard gases choked the life out of young soldiers who died agonizing deaths in trenches along the fighting fronts across Europe. Some histories of biological weapons date back to antiquity or the Middle Ages when warriors would catapult the bodies of plague victims over the walls of defending armies. By the twentieth cen- tury, scientists were concocting biological agents and develop- ing missiles that could deliver massive lethal doses of anthrax and even smallpox halfway around the world. Controlling these biological poisons, once unleashed, would be impossible and the victims would be average citizens, mothers, fathers and children, who never signed up for battle. iv As scary as weapons of mass destruction are, most wars are fought with conventional weapons, which are not only large ones such as battlefield tanks and artillery canons but also include small arms such as machine guns, assault rifles and handguns. Around the world, these weapons are not only used in battle, but are all too often diverted through payoffs and corruption to terrorist groups, drug lords and criminal organizations. They are then often used to terrorize communities and to undermine peace and development. So what can we do? In the pages that follow, you will learn the basics of disarmament, including what the United Nations, Gov- ernments and civil society groups are doing to reduce and abolish weapons that have brought so much anguish and suffering to so many. Treaties now exist to eliminate biological and chemical weapons, and to outlaw certain types of conventional weapons. Most peo- ple now believe, even if some Governments haven’t yet realized it, that nuclear weapons are not a security shield, but are a collective threat to all of us. A world free of nuclear weapons is a world that I wish for this generation and all future generations. Read, learn and become involved. Knowledge and information, and not weapons, are the true sources of power. Michael Douglas United Nations Messenger of Peace v espite a downward trend in D conflict, in 2010, the world’s Governments spent US$ 1.63 trillion on military expenditures, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). This amounts to $229 for each person alive today. CHAPTER 1 Why Is Disarmament Important? HE NATURE OF CONFLICT AND THE WEAPONRY used to fight Tit have changed dramatically in the last 100 years. Before the twentieth century, few countries maintained large armies and their weapons—while certainly deadly—mostly limited damage to the immediate vicinity of battle. The majority of those killed and wounded in pre-twentieth century conflicts were active com- batants. By contrast, twentieth-century battles were often struggles that encompassed entire societies, and in the case of the two world wars, engulfed nearly the entire globe. World War I left an estimated 8.5 million soldiers dead and 5 to 10 million civilian casualties. In World War II, some 55 million died. Weapons with more and more indiscriminate destructive power—weapons of mass destruction—were developed and used, including chemical and biological weapons and, for the first time, nuclear weapons, which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the Cold War and its attendant “proxy wars”, wars of national lib- eration, intrastate conflicts, genocides, and related humanitarian crises. Although experts vary on their estimates of the number of people who have died as a result of these conflicts, there is general agreement that the number is upwards of 60 million and perhaps as much as 100 million people, many of them non-combatants. States engaged in an all out arms race, spending US$ 1,000 billion annually by the mid-1980s to build arsenals capable of inflicting massive destruction anywhere on the globe. 1 Then with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, came a lessening of tensions between the two superpowers and military budgets began to fall. Unfortunately the shrinking of military budgets was a short-lived trend, coming to an end in the late 1990s. Between 2001 and 2009, military spending increased by an average of 5.1 per cent annually (SIPRI). War in the Twenty-first Century THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF VIOLENT CONFLICTS today are fought within States, their victims mostly civilians. Certain marginalized populations—women, children, the elderly, the dis- abled, the poor—are particularly vulnerable in conflict and bear the brunt of its harm globally. Most conflicts are fought primarily with small arms and light weapons, which account for 60 to 90 per cent of direct conflict deaths—some 250,000 each year, according to the Small Arms Survey (2007). While war still takes a huge toll globally, the number of con- flicts and the number of casualties are down since the end of the Cold War. In 2010, there were 15 major armed conflicts, according to SIPRI. The most severe conflicts and the number of genocides have declined dramatically in recent years (Human Security Brief 2007). With a few exceptions (notably Iraq and Afghanistan), con- flicts in the post-Cold War period have been fought in low-income countries by small, poorly trained armies. The 2009 Human Secu- rity Report noted that mortality rates actually decline in wartime because they are already declining in peacetime and few of to- day’s wars kill enough people to reverse the pre-war trend. Most war deaths, however, are not a direct result of combat, but instead result from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. In some wars there are 10 or more deaths from disease and mal- nutrition for every death from violent combat injury. DESPITE THE DOWNWARD TREND IN CONFLICT, in 2010, the world’s Governments spent an estimated US$ 1.63 trillion on mili- 2 tary expenditures, a level of spending not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.